COMMENTARY
Donn Esmonde: Budget pain not shared by politicians
I wish they would at least pretend to care. I wish the people who keep pounding us would make even a token gesture of sharing in the pain. The people we pay to watch our backs, the folks we elect to serve us, once again served us up on a platter.
The state budget about to be passed adds $10 billion to our already crushing load in fees, taxes and take-aways. You will pay more for everything from renewing a driver’s licence to renting a car.
Everywhere except in Albany, people running the show are sharing in the pain. Executives at WNED, the public TV station, took a 7.5 percent pay cut to ease the sting of layoffs and cutbacks. Donna Fernandes, who runs the Buffalo Zoo, sliced her salary by 10 percent to backfill a loss of state aid. Even U. S. auto executives, longtime bastions of arrogance, took a 10 percent hit to justify taxpayer handouts.
Yet the 212 legislators in Albany—including 19 from Western New York— stick it to us without flinching. None of them cut so much as a dollar from their $79,500 base salaries for part-time work. The Legislature’s whopping $228 million salary/staff/perks budget survived intact. There was no slicing of the 170 million tax dollars that state lawmakers hand out to favored groups, a legalized form of vote-buying known as “member items.” Typical of the thousands of legislator giveaways reported by the Empire Center was $6,500 to the Utica Curling Club and $15,000 to the Urban Yoga Association. Your tax dollars at work.
Democrats now control in Albany, so there is no mystery about whom to blame. Although they hold just a one-vote edge in the Senate, not one of 32 Democrats—including Western New Yorkers Bill Stachowski and Antoine Thompson—will dare defy their leader, Malcolm Smith, and vote against a jobs-killing budget.
Not only did legislators not cut their own fat, but Stachowski (stachows@senate.state.ny.us) and Thompson (athompso@senate.state.ny.us)—as a perk of Democrats taking over the Senate—siphoned extra money into staff raises. Stachowski defended the upticks as a reward for extra work. Yet even gradeschoolers know that legislators are near-useless appendages, subservient to the “three men in a room”—the governor, Senate leader Smith and Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver—who hold power.
Stachowski reportedly pays $70,000 to a “scheduler” and another $70,000 to a “communications specialist.” Can’t the guy keep his own schedule, or find somebody to write his news releases for less than 70 grand?
But singling out Stachowski misses the larger point—his bloated staff is more the rule than the exception.
Beyond that, the governor’s talk of shaving jobs from the state’s mammoth work force and lopping unneeded agencies ended up in the three-men-in-a-room’s wastebasket.
“There was plenty the Legislature could have cut in-house, but [we] did nothing,” noted State Sen. George Maziarz of Newfane. “It’s outrageous.”
As part of the near-powerless Republican minority, Maziarz fills the role of anti-Democratic attack dog. But his politically motivated assaults have the benefit of being true.
Upstate has been bleeding jobs and people for decades, as businesses are either scared off or driven away by the heaviest tax load in the land. The same legislators who are to blame just tossed another boulder on our burden, while making us pull their full load.
If New York were a democracy, we could take out our frustrations on Election Day. But lawmakers rig the system —from drawing their own election districts to “member items”—to inoculate themselves against voter rage. That is why anti-tax “tea party” protests are popping up across the state. Frankly, I’m more in the mood for a mutiny.
Log into MyBuffalo to post a comment
MyBuffalo is the new social network from Buffalo.com. Your MyBuffalo account lets you comment on and rate stories at buffalonews.com. You can also head over to mybuffalo.com to share your blog posts, stories, photos, and videos with the community. Join now or learn more.
Reader comments